Recovering inspiration in the spaces of creative writing

Abstract

This paper emerges from a project conducted between academics in literary studies and geography that explored the creative process amongst writers who write for pleasure. It seeks to understand writing as creative process as well as simply representation, recovering process as a part of creative making. Building on a long tradition of theorising process and creativity in literary studies, which has cumulatively discredited the idea of inspiration, this paper asks whether a fresh engagement between geography, literary studies and other work on creative writing can provide new insights into the creative process. Recognising that questions of representation have been pursued with different trajectories in geography and literary studies, this paper attempts to identify our common intellectual concerns as well as asking whether a rapprochement between questions of representation and non‐representational theory can provide the stimulus for an enlivened account that recovers the place of inspiration in creative writing.

These Overheating Worlds

“…On one hand, geographers were exploring textual production and reception in new ways (Brace and Johns-Putra 2010;Saunders 2010;Yap 2011) and, on the other, the nature of texts and what counts as a text were being interrogated. These approaches included texts as artefacts (Sharp 2000) and moving from landscapes as texts to new readings of materialities, objects, practices, and spaces (Lorimer 2003;Whatmore 2006;Weston 2011).…”

The Art of Writing Place

“…Moreover, “writings through the body, and the writing of bodies into research” (Hawkins , 63) reinforce the idea that to write is itself a physical, and not just intellectual, act – a polished, published piece of writing is “not just a product of research, but is also a physical trace of an embodied act and process, that of writing” (DeLyser , 343). Words, in other words, are not disembodied, and “in the performance and practice of writing, we glimpse a fusion of thought, action, body and text” (Brace and Johns‐Putra , 403). This fusion creates space for engagement about not just the place being written about, but the place of the author, and the relationship between the two.…”

The spatial event of writing: John Galsworthy and the creation of Fraternity

“…7 As such, it tends to be seen as non-representable, and while Brace and Johns-Putra demonstrate that this is not so, understandings of literary creation remain wedded to intertextual influences or to the identification of seed moments, both of which lose a sense of the liveliness and longue durée of creation. 8 This has not been helped by the power of New Criticism, which has guided literary studies away from the agents of the text as a source of literary meaning towards the agency of the text. Literary geography has not been immune to this theoretical shift, with Brosseau's work encouraging us to attend not to what a text says about space or author, but to how it says it.…”